How To Use Hugo's Image Processing With Forestry

0.32 update introduced built-in image processing for certain assets. One limitation of this feature is that it only works for page resources, which are page-relative assets stored alongside your posts in the content/ directory of your site. Since Forestry’s uploads are stored in the static/uploads/ directory by default, these assets cannot be resized in your templates using Hugo’s built-in resizer. This document will provide a step-by-step guide for working around this limitation.

Interested in image processing?! Watch our updates, we are adding Cloudinary support for Forestry giving you access to powerful image processing capabilities.

1. Create the uploads content section

In order for this to work, Hugo needs to think we have a content type called uploads, so that it can browse this section and locate subresources.

Create a folder in your content/ directory called uploads, and add a file named _index.md with the following content:

---
headless: true
---

This will configure content/uploads as a headless bundle, meaning Hugo will not generate pages for content it finds in here.

2. Change the upload file path in Forestry settings

Inside the CMS, click on Settings to access your site’s settings. Scroll down to the Media Paths section. We need to change the Upload Directory settings: By default, this will be set to /static/uploads. Change this to content/uploads so that Hugo can view these files as Page Resources.

3. Update file URL paths

In the same section, update the Public Path to match the new upload location: /uploads. Then open up the Advanced toggle and change the File Path to just :filename:.

4. Look up the page resource in your template

At this point, you can access image front matter by searching for it in the upload section resources:

In this example, the image is in the item’s front matter and has the key of image. Replace .Params.image with the name of your front matter field if this is different.

To use the page resource image, we have to search for it in the uploads content section we created earlier. We strip the /uploads/ prefix to get the filename and use .Resources.GetMatch to perform the search, storing the result in a variable called $imageResource. You can then call any of the image processing methods on $imageResource to get a resized version.

Share this article

Caught a mistake or want to contribute to the blog? Edit this page on Github!